You could definitely say I was there for the wrong reasons.
I found my way out of the neighborhood by reversing our original route. The wind, which had been almost calm during our journey to Jimmy’s, was blowing steadily from the south. Also, the haze was thicker than before and carried a harsh, chemical odor that made me wish I was breathing through a surgical mask. On my right I saw a black tower of smoke rising into the sky, and I wondered for the first time if the whole city might burn to the ground.
As I neared the gated exit of Jimmy’s neighborhood, I heard gunshots. A quick and distant pop-pop-pop. My hands reached behind my back and felt the reassuring weight of my weapon. I stopped for a moment and looked at the map, memorized the next two navigation points, and put the paper back in my pocket.
On the main road I felt vulnerable the way a child might. It seemed like I was in another country. Another world. The stalled cars on the road might have been Hollywood set pieces, the haze generated by digital effects. The ambient silence was so profound, so unusual, that the whole city felt like it had been trapped under a giant dome. After a while I noticed the distant sounds of people talking, someone shouting, dogs barking. It made me think the city wasn’t so much silent as forsaken, as if it had been abandoned and left for dead.
For years I’d been convinced climate change was a hoax, that China and the liberal media had purposely stoked the fears of uninformed citizens to undermine American economic dominance. I came to be this way because, like my friends and family, I believed most of the news on TV was fake. No matter what the “scientists” said, there was simply no way humans could measurably affect Earth’s enormous atmosphere. But then thousands of commercial airliners had come down at once, and smoke from fiery impact sites had grown thick enough to make breathing uncomfortable, and I wondered if all this time I’d been wrong about the human impact on our planet.
The real problem, which I came to understand as I walked ghostly streets north of Dallas, was all the people. There were too many cars to drive us and too many planes to fly us and too many farting cows to feed our desperate little mouths. The only way to fix the problem was to cull the herd, and that’s exactly what the EMP was meant to do. It was like a modern version of the Great Flood, only this time God also wanted to get rid of nonstop news coverage and social media and working shit jobs for corporate overlords. Only the chosen few would survive.
If you’re wondering what makes me special, you should know I’m His perfect candidate. I’m happy to assist. I’m ready to kill.
See, I’ve been angry for longer than I can remember. Angry that a company would fire me instead of more deserving losers. Angry that my sister had exiled me over a stupid mistake. Angry that the promise of America turned out to be a lie. Every generation in my family was more affluent than the one before, at least until I came along, even though I’m the smartest person my family has ever produced. It’s almost as if the entire enterprise was a big joke. As if, on television, the Hollywood elite made America look shiny and full of promise, but down here in the trenches, where real folks lived, the place smelled like shit.
But finally there were no elites to steal my dignity and no government to fuck me over and no police presence I could detect. God had put power back where it belonged: into the hands of the people. Into the hands of His chosen.
My brain whistled and screeched and I smiled a pleasant smile.
At the first major intersection, on the other side of the road, five or six men were clustered in front of a nursery. One of the men was talking to the others, gesturing wildly. I turned south and kept walking. The animated man banged loudly on the nursery door. He yelled at someone to let him in. Eventually there was a gunshot, and the men broke open the door. One after the other they disappeared inside.
I began to see more people, almost all of them men. Some were in pairs, some on their own. I came upon a shopping center, a folksy collection of shops and restaurants built to look like log cabins, all of which appeared deserted. At the south end of the center stood a Subway restaurant, where a woman emerged from the doorway looking panic-stricken. She was maybe thirty, dressed in a stretchy T-shirt and high-waisted jeans. She looked like the kind of woman who was always trying to lose ten pounds.
“Sir!” she yelled. “I need your help!”
Her brown hair was long and had been thrown together in an unruly formation on top of her head.
“I don’t have anything to eat.”
“I’m not looking for food,” she said, as if she hadn’t just stepped out of a Subway. “I need insulin. My daughter is sick and I’m completely out.”
“She’s diabetic?”
“Of course she’s diabetic! She seemed fine yesterday, but today she didn’t wake up from her nap!”
“You don’t keep extra insulin for emergencies?”
Her eyes seemed to bulge out of their sockets. I thought she was going to rear back and hit me.
“I could always drive a block to Walgreen’s and get it. But I walked down there today and it’s like a bomb went off.”
I hadn’t thought of this before, but it made sense. If Jimmy hadn’t been around to fix her up, Keri would have tried to steal pills. That’s how desperate she was.
“Please!” the woman said and put her hand on my arm. “I need help!”
“Let go of me.”
“Please, sir. My Hailey is going to die if I don’t get insulin.”
“What do you expect me to do? I don’t know where to find any.”
In the distance I heard that terrible high whistle again, the sound of anger and insanity, the voice of God. I reached behind my back and felt the reassuring steel of my gun. The pistol was hard and smooth and carefully designed, whereas this woman was a mess.
“Please!” she cried.
“Get out of my sight,” I said, and pushed past her.
“You bastard! Fuck you!”
The gun was hidden under my shirt. Blood pounded between my temples as I turned toward the woman again. The whistle screamed in my ears. Was this my first test?
I gripped the weapon and pulled it free of my pants. Slowly, deliberately, I pointed it at her head.
“Oh my God!” she screamed and threw her hands in the air. “Please don’t shoot me!”
My finger slithered over the trigger. There was no one to stop me. America was a big, fat blob of ignorance and debt, and the bill had finally come due.
“Please,” said the woman. “My poor baby. She’s got no one but me.”
“That’s too bad, because you are a shitty parent.”
Rivers of mascara-stained tears poured out of her eyes. Her sobs were choked by congestion.
I closed one eye and mimed a gunshot. All at once the screeching in my head disappeared.
“Bang.”
While the woman screamed, I placed the gun, safety still on, back in my pants.
Then I turned south again and smiled a Jimmy Jameson smile. For years, liberal snowflakes and social justice warriors had thwarted the American merit system. Their socialist agenda had weakened the country, exposed a soft underbelly, and it was time to make things right again.
I wouldn’t be so merciful next time.
Eventually I reached a bridge that crossed the George Bush Turnpike. Beneath me, people walked along the access road or sat against a concrete retaining wall. I might have jumped to my death if not for a chain-link fence adjacent to the sidewalk.